Marriage, a History (25 page)

The Western European marriage system, by contrast, offered women more opportunities to affect the terms on which they entered marriage and more incentive to challenge patriarchal authority instead of bending it to their own ends. Furthermore, wives and daughters in Western Europe had more inheritance rights than in many other systems around the world. With divorce illegal and the sons of a mistress ineligible to be heirs, a man had little choice but to pass his estate to his female heirs if his wife was barren or bore only daughters, as happened in about 20 percent of marriages. Widows in particular often controlled substantial property.

Except for
femes soles,
wives remained without significant legal rights in Western Europe. But even as early as the fifteenth century, the growing importance of the married couple household as an economic unit made marital harmony a desirable goal. In the 1430s the Renaissance humanist Leon Battista Alberti, advising men on family life, wrote: “There is no one to whom you have more opportunity to communicate fully and reveal your mind than to your own wife.” The fifteenth-century Catholic canon Albrecht von Eyb asked, “What could be happier and sweeter, than . . . where husband and wife are so drawn to one another by love and choice, and experience such friendship between themselves, that what one wants, the other also chooses, and what one says, the other maintains in silence as if he had said it himself ?”
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The Protestant Reformation accelerated this trend toward idealizing marriage. When Martin Luther attacked the Church’s practice of selling indulgences in 1517, he ignited a firestorm. Within a few years, many German princes converted to Lutheranism. It rapidly became the state religion of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Between 1520 and the 1550s, different varieties of Protestantism were adopted by various Swiss cities. The papacy’s thousand-year monopoly over Christian doctrine was destroyed. And one of the central disputes between Catholics and Protestants was over the role of marriage.
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Protestants bitterly opposed the papacy’s policies and pronouncements on marriage. They argued that clergy should be allowed to marry, because clerical celibacy only encouraged priests to keep concubines and seduce their parishioners. Catholics were wrong, they said, to call marriage a necessary evil or a second-best existence to celibacy. Rather, marriage was “a glorious estate.” They also believed there was no biblical foundation for monasteries and convents. Wherever they gained power, Protestants closed those institutions down. Even before they took power, they supported escapes and “rescues” of cloistered nuns.
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There were plenty of nuns dissatisfied with their enforced commitment to celibacy. Katharina von Bora, later to become Luther’s wife, managed to get herself and eight other nuns smuggled out of their convent in a delivery wagon. She moved to Wittenberg, where she hoped to marry, but the marriage fell through because the man’s parents opposed his wedding an ex-nun with no dowry. Martin Luther, an acquaintance, offered to arrange her marriage to a local parson. Katharina replied that she was not interested in the parson but would marry another of Luther’s friends or Luther himself. Luther, no advocate of youthful freedom of choice, first got permission from his father, then married her. Luther’s political patron gave them a former monastery as a wedding present, and Katharina soon presided over a house that included five children, several orphaned nephews and nieces, four children of a widowed friend, and several servants, tutors, boarders, and refugees, quite a change from her former cloistered life.
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Some rulers converted to Protestantism for political reasons, to free themselves from the long-distance interference of the pope and to gain control over economic and political resources held by the church, including the regulation of marriage. This was dramatically illustrated in England. In 1501, King Henry VII had married his fifteen-year-old son Arthur to eighteen-year-old Catherine of Aragon, daughter of the King of Spain. When Arthur died just five months later, Catherine, perhaps hoping to be sent home, claimed that their marriage had never been consummated. If Henry had sent Catherine back to her father, he would have lost his alliance with Spain and her dowry of two hundred thousand ducats. So he decided to marry her to his second son, twelve-year-old Henry. Although this violated the Church’s rules on incest, the pope granted a dispensation.

The young Henry succeeded to the throne in 1509, ruling as Henry VIII. But Catherine experienced several stillbirths, and their only surviving child was a daughter. When Henry became infatuated with his wife’s maid of honor, Anne Boleyn, and she refused to become his mistress, he resolved to marry Anne and produce a male heir. To do this, he needed the pope to annul his marriage to Catherine.

Henry’s timing was terrible. Charles, the Holy Roman Emperor, who was also Catherine’s nephew, had recently captured Rome and made the pope his virtual prisoner. So the pope, perhaps under duress, rejected Henry’s request. A century earlier we might have seen a reprise of the international struggle over Lothar’s attempt to divorce Theutberga. But by this time rulers in Germany and Scandinavia had already broken with Rome and established alternative church hierarchies of their own, and Henry decided to follow suit. He declared himself the new “protector” of the English clergy and replaced the pope’s archbishop with his own man, who obligingly annulled the marriage to Catherine. Henry married Anne, already pregnant with the future Queen Elizabeth. In 1534 Henry seized all the Catholic Church’s property and set up the Church of England.

When Henry’s marriage did not produce the desired male heir and his sexual attentions began to wander again, he had Anne jailed on trumped-up charges of adultery, then had her executed. Eleven days later he married her successor.

Henry eventually went through six different wives and still ended up with only two daughters and one very sickly son as potential heirs. A memory aid helps British schoolchildren keep track of the fate of Henry’s successive wives: “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.” The surviving wife, Catherine Parr, was fortunate that Henry died only four years after their marriage or the chant might have ended differently.
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Not all nuns and monks welcomed the dissolution of the convents and monasteries. But Protestant governments ignored their protests in the rush to get their hands on the vast lands and wealth of the Catholic Church. In England and parts of Germany, many nuns and monks were simply dumped back into lay society, completely unprepared for the secular life.

Faced with these attacks, the Catholic Church stiffened its position on the spiritual superiority of celibacy. In 1563 the Council of Trent declared: “If anyone says that the married state excels the state of virginity or celibacy, and that it is better and happier to be united in matrimony than to remain in virginity or celibacy, let him be anathema.”
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Protestants, in turn, insisted that marriage was the fundamental building block of society. Luther argued that “all creatures are divided into male and female; even trees marry; likewise budding plants; there is also marriage between rocks and stones.”
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But these differences meant less in practice than in theory. The growing economic importance and political independence of the nuclear family led writers of all religious persuasions to direct more attention to relations between husband and wife. Because marriage was so important, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century commentators agreed, people ought to think carefully about the character, as well as the wealth, of their partners. The best mate was someone whose social station, temperament, values, and work ethic were similar to one’s own. There should also be enough love, or least mutual respect, between prospective partners to prevent quarrels that might disrupt the orderly functioning of the household.
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These notions seem to have spread rapidly during this period. Some parents even expressed sentiments like those of the Duchess of Suffolk, who wanted her son to marry the daughter of the Duke of Somerset but wrote to a friend in 1550 that she hoped the young couple would “begin their love of themselves, without forcing.”
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More and more, the words
love
and
marriage
were used in the same sentence, and the outright idealization of adultery that had marked the courtly love poetry and popular literature of the Middle Ages became rarer. Whereas medieval religious writers had used the word
love
to describe the relationship between man and Jesus or the feelings that neighbors should have toward one another, in the sixteenth century sermons began to emphasize love between husband and wife. By the seventeenth century preachers were condemning husbands who governed by fear alone, without an equal measure of love. The English Puritan Robert Cleaver said that a husband should not command his wife like a servant but exert his authority in a way that would “rejoice and content her.” Catholic writers expressed similar sentiments. And the growing number of middle-class households in the expanding commercial economy created a large pool of families that were especially receptive to these ideas.
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A new emphasis on the married couple’s right to privacy also emerged in the sixteenth century, as Protestants and Catholics alike began to condemn the noisy public rituals that had marked a community’s acceptance or rejection of a marriage. We have already seen what a fracas could break out when a community in the late Middle Ages disapproved of a particular marriage. But neighbors were traditionally just as boisterous in celebrating a wedding. They escorted the newlyweds to bed, playing loud music and making sexual jokes. In England, wedding guests played games such as throwing the stocking, in which the male bachelors in the crowd threw the couple’s stockings at the bride while she sat in bed with her new husband. The first man to hit her on the nose with a stocking was said to be the next to marry. Although the revelers eventually retired so that the couple could consummate their vows, they returned the next morning to wake the couple with more music and merriment.

By the seventeenth century religious reformers were unanimously condemning these customs as insults to the dignity of marriage, but many individuals clung to the old ways. In 1667, Samuel Pepys wrote that he had attended a wedding at which the neighbors were not invited, as was customary, to wake the couple with music in the morning, “which is very mean me-thinks, and is as if they had married like dog and bitch.”
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Despite the growing emphasis on the special relationship between a husband and wife, Western Europeans were still far from accepting the idea that marriage should be based on love and intimacy. Even as reformers rejected neighbors’ right to regulate and supervise marriage, they encouraged the state to tighten the definition of a legal marriage and shore up the right of parents to veto a proposed match. Luther argued that parents did not have the right to force a child into a loveless match but that they were totally justified in forbidding a match, even if the couple loved each other. In the sixteenth century Catholic theologians also backed away from their earlier commitment to the validity of a marriage based on consent.

During this period the same social changes that were creating more family partnerships and increasing the independence of the nuclear family were eroding the constraints that had led youths to defer willingly to parents and neighbors on matters of marriage and sex. More and more individuals were making their living by doing day labor for wages, rather than by farming, entering long-term apprenticeships, or being live-in servants.
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Authorities became alarmed by the new breed of “masterless” men and women: beggars, migrant workers, mercenary soldiers, servants who claimed the right to change employers, and “idle persons” who tried to gather food in what used to be the “commons” instead of just accepting whatever work they were offered. The number of such rootless people grew as real wages for farm workers and landless laborers dropped sharply between 1500 and 1620. Officials saw the young men wandering from town to town as a threat to public order. Established journeymen and apprentices feared having to compete with them for work. Unmarried women were considered worrisome on moral as well as economic grounds.

In Germany and France, cities passed laws forbidding unmarried women from establishing residence unless they were employed as a servant in a household and requiring them to leave town if they gave up such a position. In many regions, city and parish officials, fearing that impoverished individuals who married would be unable to maintain independent households, started to forbid such people from marrying at all. A typical concern was expressed in 1628 by an English minister who wrote of a young woman in his parish that “she hath no house nor home of her own.” He noted that she would likely be a “charge on the parish, and therefore will hardly be suffered to marry.”
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But what about those who ignored such rules and married “by consent”? In theory Protestants may have held marriage in higher esteem than Catholics, but in practice they were far less willing to accept the validity of an informally contracted marriage. In Zurich, a 1525 ordinance decreed that a marriage was not valid unless attended by “two pious, honorable, and incontestable witnesses.” In Zurich and Geneva, a marriage contracted by young people without parental consent could be rescinded by the courts, even if the couple had been living together for some time. In 1534, Nuremberg officials ruled that parental consent, up to the age of twenty-five for men and twenty-two for women, was needed for a legal marriage. In the 1520s and 1530s, Strasbourg raised the legal age of marriage for men to twenty-five and for women to twenty, and then changed it again, to twenty-five for both sexes, in 1565. Protestant courts were quick to invalidate clandestine marriages, even if based on “words of the present” and consummated by sexual intercourse or long-term cohabitation.
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